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Corey Wagner, co-founder of Kelowna based tech startup Bananatag, accredits the company’s early success to a marketing campaign in which it used a public relations launch to put its own product to the test.

Launched in August 2012, Bananatag allows individuals to track opened email and clicked links on their daily emails, taking the guesswork out of how recipients are interacting with their email. Until recently, only marketers and salespeople using mass email services were able to track and see statistics. Bananatag has changed this by bringing the same capabilities to every day email users.

Along with opens and clicks, Bananatag also shows users the location of the recipient and the device the email was opened on. These in-depth metrics allow users to better interact and respond to their contacts. With extensions available for Outlook and Gmail, Bananatag makes email tracking simple and accessible to all.

As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Joe Pulizzi, BtoB, Mashable, VentureBeat, and Business2Community.

If you follow the stock market, then you understand what a correction is. Technically, a correction in the stock market happens when stocks (as a whole) decline at least 10 percent over a relatively short period of time, usually after a nice run up in stocks (called a bull market). Over the last 50 years, we’ve seen (for the most part), a bull market in paid media. It was clear back then and it is even clearer today: most brands were (are) overweight in paid media and underweight in owned media. In this post, Joe Pulizzi explains that the movement of content marketing is a necessary correction in the marketplace, and why this shift is occurring.

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Social media has become an integral part of the marketing mix for new companies. Startups are employing these valuable channels to promote themselves, receive market feedback, interact with key industry players, and offer relatively inexpensive customer support to beta testers and other early adopters of their technologies.

Yet despite these benefits, many startups aren’t allocating the resources necessary to support social media initiatives until after the product is released, their first customers are established, and they begin seeing revenue. As with all marketing activities, social media should be regarded as an investment that will generate profit. And just like launching a new product, social media requires a runway to set up the strategy and channels and develop the audience and content to succeed.

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As a marketer and as a consumer of vast quantities of media, I couldn’t help but notice the surge in the use of infographics by my fellow marketers and the media in recent months. This has inspired quite a debate about whether the rise of the infographic signals the end of journalism as we know it.

What are infographics?

According to Wikipedia, “Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge.” In a recent Mashable article, “How marketers can get more from infographics,” the author, Laura Hampton, added the following worthwhile addendum to that definition:

…infographics can communicate just about anything, so long as it’s engaging, relevant and more compelling as an image than as pure text.

Infographics come in a variety of formats, too. Layout, orientation and styling are limited only by the creativity of the designer. We’re even starting to see the rise of “infomotion” — infographics with moving elements and interactivity that further engage the audience.

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As many of you probably already know, Google Plus finally rolled out brand pages this week. Upon first review, brand pages look very similar to Facebook pages, but a closer look reveals added benefits that will help businesses make closer connections with their supporters.

It’s Friday, yet again, which means it’s time for our weekly roundup. This one happens to be the last of 2013. Over the week, we’ve read great content from Social Media Explorer, Marketing Sherpa and Startup Professional Musings [...]

Damn it, Beyoncé: Now all the pundits will say marketing is unnecessary

It didn’t take long after music megastar Beyoncé dropped her latest release onto Apple iTunes with no advance warning or usual hype-fest for the armchair pundits and marketing deniers to trumpet that marketing was now dead [...]

Five keys to your presentation success in 2014

The good news – 2013 was a good year for most businesses. The bad news – most business presentations delivered in 2013 still sucked. Whether it’s an investor pitch, an elevator pitch, a customer update, or an important sales presentation, here are five ideas to help make your presentations remarkable in 2014 [...]

Becoming a more successful you in 2014

It’s that time of year again, when pundits and armchair quarterbacks of every stripe offer up their insights on the year past and their predictions for the year to come. This isn’t one of those posts [...]

Best of: I’m sick and tired of hearing that Canadians don’t take risks

This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from December 2011. We welcome your feedback [...]

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Recent Comments

Francis Moran : Hi, Jo.
Thanks for the comment.
I had hoped to attend the conference but it was sold out. Maybe next year.
Not sure if your collaboration comment was directed at me or CCDI. If me, please drop me an email at francis@francis-moran.com and tell me more about what you have in mind.

Jo Head : I share your disappointment with the Expo - it was barely reflective of the ambition of the organisers and not at all reflective of the excitement, passion and creativity that I have come to love. I thought I was going to the Expo and booked the conference in error - the biggest & best mistake I have ever made. I feel inspired to see how I can help to deliver the Expo objective and to open the gateway. I enquired as to the export process through the CCDI ( Cape Craft and Design Institute ) whose role it is to promote export - they asked me what I meant by process. Their database (when you can access it) is even more disappointing than the Expo. Is there an opportunity to collaborate?